Queen sends in lawyers over 'royal rage' film

The Queen has instructed her lawyers to take action over the way a BBC programme trailer misrepresented her by suggesting she had stormed out of a photo shoot.

Farrer & Co, solicitors to the Queen, have written to RDF Media Group, the film company which made the programme for the corporation. It is understood the letter - and a similar one to the BBC - warns that the programme makers have put themselves in breach of contract by their actions.

Senior officials at Buckingham Palace now believe the programme has been "tainted" by the fiasco, which threatened to damage the Queen's reputation. There is growing pressure on the makers of A Year With the Queen to scrap it.

The Queen's lawyers have pored over contracts drawn up between the three parties - Buckingham Palace, the BBC and RDF - before filming began. One senior source said: "There are now serious doubts whether this programme will ever see the light of day."

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A spokesman for RDF told The Sunday Telegraph: "The [BBC's] investigation is ongoing. [RDF's chief executive] David Frank is in conversations with the lawyers and the BBC. He's in contact with our lawyers and the Palace lawyers - he has been talking to everyone that has been in touch."

The BBC apologised to the Queen last month after admitting that a trailer had been manipulated to make it appear as if Her Majesty had angrily walked out of a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz, the celebrity photographer.

The reality was that the footage showed the Queen striding purposefully through the corridors of Buckingham Palace as she arrived for the shoot.

The misleading trailer was shown to journalists at the launch of BBC1's autumn schedule by Peter Fincham, the channel controller. He was unaware at the time that footage had been edited out of sequence. The BBC later received an apology from RDF in which the company accepted responsibility for "manipulating the chronology" of the footage.

The Queen has told her lawyers and her press office not to discuss the dispute until the BBC completes an internal investigation into what went wrong. However, one source said: "The Queen feels very let down."

The dispute has already had major repercussions for the BBC because it triggered a crisis over "faked" programmes.

Mark Stephens, a senior media lawyer with Finers Stephens Innocent, believes the Queen has a strong case for breach of contract.

"The Queen agreed to appear in a programme subject to standard editorial guidelines and controls," he said. "The editorial standards of the BBC require them not to present a false picture. If they do portray someone in a false light, they have breached their -contract."

Mr Stephens said the Queen would also have grounds for taking action for defamation because the trailer had damaged her reputation. "A programme wrongly portraying the Queen as having a 'hissy fit' because she had been asked not to wear a tiara, or whatever nonsense, is clearly defamatory," he said. However, sources close to the Queen say it is unthinkable that she would want to get involved in a "messy" libel claim.

A corporation spokesman said: "The BBC has commissioned Will Wyatt [a former senior executive] to conduct an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the inclusion of this project in the recent BBC1 autumn launch. We do not feel it appropriate to comment on matters relating to this until the inquiry has reported." Mr Wyatt's findings are expected next month.

It is understood, however, that both the BBC and RDF still hope the programme, once correctly edited, will be shown. They say it provides a fascinating insight into the Queen's life and is well researched.